The China Tour: 18 Photos from the First 4,559 km of My World Tour for Climate Action

This is a copy of a post that I wrote for the blog of Climate Ride, the organization that supported this phase’s fundraising efforts. It is mostly intended for readers new to the project.

Hi, I’m Forrest, founder of 360bybike.com, an around the world (40,000 km) bike tour aimed at using on-the-ground storytelling to increase public understanding of climate change impacts and solutions. Since I started my ride four months ago, I’ve traveled 4,559 km (2,832 mi) through Southern and Western China, including the mountainous fringes of Tibet. For this first phase of the tour, I worked with Climate Ride to fundraise $3,500 for 350.org. I’m thankful to them for their fundraising tools and their support in the fundraising process.

My route over the past few months: Moving south from where I taught last year, turning west at Hong Kong, across South China to Hanoi, and then North through the easternmost part of cultural Tibet to Chengdu. Click red markers for stories from those sites.

My first ride with a fully loaded touring bike! I had never been on a tour of longer than two days before I started out.

I met these guys on my third day of riding, and we got to talking. It turned out they were working for a new electric car dealership in the city of Huaihua, Hunan. I sat down and interviewed them, and they turned into my first climate story! Read it here.

Hong Kong still abides by British traffic rules, and bikes officially have no place in the city’s transportation plan. The city is the best in the world for public transportation–over 90% of daily journeys are on busses or subways or ferries–but the packed, fenced-in roads are hell on the nascent local cycling community.

In stark contrast to the city itself, some of Hong Kong’s outlying islands run on bicycle traffic. On the island of Cheung Chau, nearly all of the residents commute by bicycle. Above is the parking lot for the ferry, which most locals use to commute.

A PSA plays on a megascreen in downtown Guangzhou. There’s very little climate denial in China. Everyday people are informed on the science, the news, and what major countries are doing to change things. But with its tradition of strong man leadership and more than half a century of repressive Party governance, most people don’t believe that they have a role solving big issues like climate change. However, with the recent rise of NGOs in cities like Guangzhou and Chengdu, more and more people are getting involved with service work and community-based change. I talked to the heads of Rice Harmony, an organic rice CSA, while I was in Guangzhou. Read that story here.

I met up with the young, enthusiastic advocates at 350 Hanoi. Political restrictions hold them back from protesting their country’s rising coal dependency, but the group works to educate their city’s youth on environmental issues and renewable energy.

Windmills at dawn in Yunnan. In China, the further you travel outside the country’s population centers, the more renewables you find. Nearly every building in Yunnan, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes of the nation’s provinces, is blanketed in inexpensive solar hot water heaters, and the province has a high density of utility-scale wind farms. These poorer areas, many of which have not previously had reliable access to electricity, also tend to be ones with more well-preserved ecosystems, never having experienced the heavy industry, mining and coal-powered energy plants that have driven the rise of China’s economy and the destruction of its environment.

There’s evidence everywhere of the growing capacity of renewables. This truck came driving down the road one day, with two workers in the back to steer the wing away from oncoming traffic and roadside obstacles.

The highway heading past Lijiang, in Northern Yunnan, and further into the mountains of Eastern Tibet. E-bikes and motorcycles are huge in China and bicycles are making a comeback, so many urban highways have protected bike lanes. Solar- and wind-powered street lights are also increasingly common

The road through western Sichuan has some vicious climbs. This 70km section of road was nothing more than dust and stones when I passed through.

The Tibetan culture of the Kham region became more and more apparent as I moved farther into Sichuan. This style of home is characteristic in the region, with thick earthen walls providing excellent insulation for people and livestock during long, cold winters. Traditional homes have wood-fired stoves for cooking and heating. Chimneys run up the inside of the thick walls and heat the second floor sleeping area.

Stones the height of humans, reminders of glaciers long melted.

At the top of the ride, 4,696 m / 15,406 ft

Prayer flags at the top of the “Pass at the Gateway to Kham”

Many people call the Himalaya “The Third Pole.” In such an arid region, glacial melt is vital to maintaining a year-round water supply for people, crops and livestock. And it’s not just residents of the area: Much of China and India, which together contain more than a third of the world’s population, are dependent on rivers fed by these glaciers. China’s arid north is already having troubles with reduced water supply and dropping water tables, and scientists say that on our current trajectory, 90 percent of the area’s glaciers could be gone by the end of the century.Hong Kongers march for a strong COP21 climate accord as part of the November 29th Global Climate March, which drew half a million people worldwide.The momentum surrounding this week’s climate conference in Paris rises from human eyes. A farmer in Russia stares out over stunted sprigs of winter wheat. A child in Manchuria wheezes lightly, forehead to the frosted kitchen window, eyes on a smog that shrouds the world and the light of the stars. An Australian crowd of 5,000 sits in silence facing the steps of the government hall, remembering countrymen who perished last week in brush fires and neighbors who lost their homes to rising seas. It’s night in rural north Rwanda, well past dark, but the children are still up, doing their book work by the light of the sun. Leaders in the news are excited by momentum and the sudden political possibility of marginal change. Let’s remember where it started: in eyes and in voices.

Air, Ice, Earth, Embers

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Published by

fqwatkins

Hi, I'm Forrest. I grew up in Eugene, OR and went to Whitman College, where I studied Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology and Spanish. I loved my time in school (and will probably love it again at some point), but right now it is time for something else. So I am embarking to realize my ever-expanding dream of biking around the world to document the effects of climate change and how everyday people are responding.
For more on the project, check out: http://360bybike.com/the-plan-cycling/
View all posts by fqwatkins